Like songs that newborn songbirds know, migration routes that animals know without being shown, that a mother dog should break the amniotic sac to release the puppies inside, what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.
It seems it implausible to me that all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling; it seems to require much more complex encoding of information, pattern matching, templates, and/or memory.
However this specifically works in humans — and considering the diversity of actual human preferences includes, amongst many other things, non-existant dragons* — the first I heard of the term "superstimulus" was with the example of certain beetles that kept trying to copulate with beer bottles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
* Humans must have something guiding us, or we'd all be (a) bisexual and (b) equally often aroused by dragons as by those we could actually have a child with; the fact that dragons happen at all is simply an indication that our brains are likely using a very simple set of heuristics to get there, and simple heuristics is totally a thing that DNA could encode
Parental teaching and learning is a spectrum and not a binary. We've found with relocating deer (to similar but not identical environments) doing worse until learning occurs over a few generations and they catch up. Animals may not be as intelligent as us but their ability to learn and adapt should not be underestimated.
Methods of intergenerational transfer: DNA, RNA, bacteria, fungi, verbal latencies, explicit training
From https://x.com/westurner/status/1213675095513878528 :
> Does the fundamental limit of the amount of classical information encodable in the human genome (even with epigenetics & simultaneous encoding) imply a vast capacity for learning survival-beneficial patterns in very little time, with very few biasing priors?
> [Fundamental 'gbit' requirement 1: “No Simultaneous Encoding”:] if a gbit is used to perfectly encode one classical bit, it cannot simultaneously encode any further information. Two close variants of this are Zeilinger’s Principle (10) and Information Causality (11).
> Is there a proved presumption that genes only code in sequential combinations? Still overestimating the size of the powerset of all [totally-ordered] nonlocal combinations? Still trying to understand counterfactuals in re: constructor theory
Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
(quantum) Counterfactuals reasoning: https://www.google.com/search?q=(quantum)+*Counterfactual*+r... :
> Counterfactual reasoning is the process of considering events that could have happened but didn't.
Counterfactual definiteness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_definiteness
Quantum discord; there are multiple types of quantum entropy; entanglement and non-entanglement entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord
N-ary entanglement,
Collective unconscious > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious
FWIU memories are stored in the cortex and also in the hippocampus; "Brain found to store three copies of every memory" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41352124
Information that might be passed from parent to offspring after conception is not hereditary by definition, and would be a type of learning, (ie birds singing to babies in eggs, antibody transferring from mother to baby)
Everything else you mention is very easily passed down via genetics which is not chemical signaling, but actual information encoding. And simple rules can lead to complex behavior.
Edit: Here’s an example to better illustrate the genes power of information encoding. Camouflage, which is a genetically heritable trait, can be incredibly complex. We can think of the information encoded in the genes for camouflage as a visual description of the environment that the animal evolved in. So the gene’s have actually encoded what the dessert environment looks like, or the sea floor, or the vegetation. That’s a single example, but every animal carries such complex information (how to navigate certain landscapes, how to survive current living pathogens in the environment, etc) within their genes.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-fetuses-learn-to-talk-while-theyr...
McConnell, J. (1962). Memory transfer via cannibalism in planaria. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 3, 1-42.
How do you know they "know" them?
> all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling
Why do you presume they are chemical signals?
> pattern matching
Psychedelics show the absurd power of layered pattern matching in our brains and what happens when you disrupt those mechanisms. I would not discount it so readily.
It's a statistical guess, as with most phenomena. When individuals, alone, consistently travel toward direction without observable prompting, it's expected there is another stimuli. This may be an unseen force (birds following magnetic fields). However, it appears there is a genetic component.
https://archive.is/vt6rU#selection-797.2-797.236
Notably: "They also inherit from their parents the directions in which they need to fly in the autumn and spring, and if the parents each have different genetically encoded directions, their offspring will end up with an intermediate direction."
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score...
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.I experienced this in two occasions. First, when I was going to therapy, and somehow managed to reach these traumas, the second is in deep meditation, which Japanese call "meeting with the ghosts".
Traumas stay fresh until you face them again, and acknowledge them. The moment you accept that they have happened, you have the chance to heal them.
This doesn't mean the process is smooth, painless or easy. It's neither, but it's very possible.
> the paper is trying to explain what psychedelics do to the brain. It theorizes that they weaken high-level priors (in this case, you can think of these as the tendency to fit everything to an existing narrative), allowing things to be seen more as they are
> A corollary of relaxing high-level priors or beliefs under psychedelics is that ascending prediction errors from lower levels of the system (that are ordinarily unable to update beliefs due to the top-down suppressive influence of heavily-weighted priors) can find freer register in conscious experience
In the context of trauma, the trauma-induced unhealthy belief systems would be the high-level priors that have lodged themselves in strongly, and the effect of the psychedelics would help the person actually process and validate them against real world evidence (beyond the traumatic ones). I can imagine that actually having to do that - seeing all your trauma-based narratives and how they have shaped your view of things, and confronting how they clash with reality - being a pretty rough ride.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ [2] REBUS And The Anarchic Brain: Toward A Unified Model Of The Brain Action Of Psychedelics
Maybe a very concrete way to ask would be: what's the difference between someone who undergoes the ayahuasca experience and successfully "processes" a trauma, vs someone who does not? Is there such a thing?
In peru?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-k...
>As various approaches that can help people with PTSD are suggested by the author, the book would be more comprehensive if further empirical findings are provided to demonstrate their effectiveness and how readers can integrate them into practice
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8418154/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ptsd/comments/plskph/warning_the_bo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/08/02/body-keeps-s...
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/body-keeps-score-trauma/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-again...
https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/analysis-of-the-bod...
A Critical Evaluation of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score By Francine Tan
I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.
So, for example, a dangerous situation causes stress and stress causes the heart to beat faster, all normal. But make the heart beat faster through external means and it will also cause stress. So it is not clear which one is the cause and which one is the effect, probably some weird combination, with all sorts of feedbacks. Life is messy.
So get a heart that isn't yours and it will not beat in a familiar way, which, in turn may be interpreted as changing emotions. And even if memories are entirely contained within the brain, what if the heartbeat is part of these memories, with a heart that reacts differently, the meaning of these memories may change.
For a tech analogy, in order to record a video game session, it is common to only record player input. If the game is deterministic, you just need to run the game with the recorded inputs and the session will be faithfully reproduced. It is much more compact than something like a video. Now imagine we change the game engine so that it responds slightly differently to inputs, now, when replayed, the game will appear different. If we imagine memories are "replays" and the engine is our body, than altering our body will also alter our memories.
Wild. Doesn't necessarily surprise me too much that the body stores some memories outside the brain, but it seems _very_ surprising that another body/brain can read and understand ones created by another. I'd assume that the whole mind and memory system is one big correlated mess, not essentially composed of data files in a ~standard encoding.
This is the most fascinating thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the link
But I can only imagine the extrapolations that alternative medicine people will make with this.
It's learning in the same sense the immune system learns to fight of infections. The difference is that the mechanism by which cells record state is similar to one of the mechanisms also used by the brain at the cellular level, which you would expect.
The cells and structures that make up the brain evolved from simpler structures, so we would expect some reuse of mechanism.
It's literally setup like a gauntlet. New immune cells from marrow come through the Thymus and are tested. They need to pass through and attack foreign cells then pass through and _not_ attack host cells. They are essentially tagged and filtered by this process.
Most cells are let go into the body, some cells are reserved as self regulatory cells, and the others that do not pass are destroyed.
It's a literal quality control and selection machine for your immune system.
(We tend to think of just the latter, but all three significantly impact “strength”.)
Each of these has mechanisms of maintenance and faster recovery after use lapses. Which can all be described as memory.
First, the spinal cord and motor cortex learn more effective coordination. Proper coordination of muscles impacts strength by ensuring our different muscles cooperate effectively to apply force where we need it. We imagine simple movements as simple efforts, but they are really a series of coordinated multiple muscle response.
This can be considered “normal” neural/cognitive learning and memory in the brain, spinal coord and nervous system.
Second, our nervous system learns to send higher intensity demand signals to the muscles.
I don’t know what the mechanism is here. Maybe higher coordination of simultaneous signals within the muscle? Maybe an increase in signal strengths? An increase in nerve cells? A combination? In any case, once learned, this learning is mostly maintained despite loss of stimulus and relearned quickly.
This creates a common source of injury. After a workout hiatus, our ability to demand intense muscle response can exceed the abilities of our reduced muscle’s capabilities. It can feel too easy to push our bodies hard again, resulting in injuries that abort the attempt to restart training.
Restart weight lifting programs with patience and caution, until muscles catch up with the renewed overload, hypertrophy and recovery cycle.
The third very long term memory mechanism in muscle cells is quite interesting: myonuclear accretion. Support cells merge with muscle cells permanently giving them multiple nuclei, permanently increasing their ability and speed to create the proteins we need for hypertrophy (muscle growth) and recovery (repair and energy store recuperation).
Myonuclear accretion allows muscle cells to grow far beyond their original limits. And accounts for why previously trained muscles can retain a modestly higher level of strength and size, even after training regimen lapses.
All three memory mechanisms account for why regaining previous high levels of strength happens faster, with less effort, than it took to gain any level of strength the first time.
Aother memory mechanism include higher interoception, prioperception, kinematics, and higher level learning regarding exercise form, workout discipline, workout organization, body limitations, injury warnings, positive associations with making effort, etc. that are all result in long term increased strength and ability recover and accumulate it.
The results of their experiments are surprising and intriguing: bringing cancer cells back into proper functioning, “anthrobots” self-assembling from throat tissue cells, malformed tadpoles becoming normal frogs, cells induced to make an eye by recruiting their neighbors…
An excerpt from the link below: Our main model system is morphogenesis: the ability of multicellular bodies to self-assemble, repair, and improvise novel solutions to anatomical goals. We ask questions about the mechanisms required to achieve robust, multiscale, adaptive order in vivo, and about the algorithms sufficient to reproduce this capacity in other substrates. One of our unique specialties is the study of developmental bioelectricity: ways in which all cells connect in somatic electrical networks that store, process, and act on information to control large-scale body structure. Our lab creates and employs tools to read and edit the bioelectric code that guides the proto-cognitive computations of the body, much as neuroscientists are learning to read and write the mental content of the brain.
Probably already aware of methods like:
- Tissue Nanotransfection : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection
- "Direct neuronal reprogramming by temporal identity factors" (2023) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122168120#abstract
For example, if a female first has sex with very large virile males and absorbs their sperm packages and then gets fertilized by a tiny frail male, the offspring's size is on the larger side, determined by the previous sexual encounters.
Not sure if there has been any followup on this research.
For past-life memories, uh no.
For memories in non-brain tissues, there's a major detail problem there, if any of this pans out at all. For memories transferred from another person, it makes no sense. Your nerves don't transfer universal (between human) data files around, and your brain is a tangled mess. Memories won't transfer beyond, maybe, possibly, some stuff around personality, mood, and various neurotransmitter things.
And I don't think it would be common, if it happens at all, without intentional development and use of new tech.
For example it should theoretically be possible to recover the basic personality of a cryogenically vitrified brain, based quite a bit on genetics and some on brain structure, but beyond that I can't say. Unless you know many things I don't, and have carefully checked that you truly know them, you should not expect memory recovery, at least above the low double digits percentage.
And that's assuming "full technology", I for sure don't know to even get started.
What's next?
Exciting titles, I wonder what's behind them.
It meant there was some low level mechanism lurking inside at least those cells, so not too surprising it's more general.
The source study states:
> Our findings show that canonical features of memory do not necessarily depend on neural circuitry, but can be embedded in the dynamics of signaling cascades conserved across different cell types.
Is also written in an obfuscated way, that is often a red flag. Some of the phrases seem more created by AI than for humans.
Fundamental building blocks for vaccines.